The Yeats Journal of Korea/한국 예이츠 저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2008.29.209
Vol. 29 (2008): 209-224
Modernism and Post-Modernism Aesthetics in
Seeing Things*
1)
Hong, Sung Sook(Cheongju Univ.)
I
The poetry by Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things, is motivated by the writer's
longing for his dead father. Maximizing the transcendental atmosphere, it mainly
deals with some memories of his dead father. This poetry is characterized by the
description from the beginning to the end of the spiritual world, which is saying
that the poet expands his concern into life after death. Especially, the prelude is an
English version of Virgil's Aeneid in which as Aeneus is begging shaman Cumae to
meet his dead father at hell, the latter answers like this: "the way down to hell is
easy to access, however, the way to return is hard to access. "This poetry especially
deals with the subject of "Where does the spirit live?"
Analyses by some critics like Michael Hofmann, Edward Hirsh, and John Lucas
show that Seeing Things deals with the transcendental or spiritual world soaked with
the very Irish atmosphere and thought, and that this poetry also deals with the
* This paper is written by the financial support of the 2008-2010 Special Research Program,
Cheongju University
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process of transforming the concrete into the abstract to the extent that the boundary
is ambiguous, which leads the writer to build the following hypothesis that Seeing
Things is underpinned by modern and post-modern aesthetics.
II
To prove my hypothesis that Seeing Things is underpinned by modern and
post-modern aesthetics, I'll summarize what modernism and post-modernism aesthetics
are, asking how different they are and what they have in common. A writer talks
about their differences like this:
The main difference lies in the fact that "modern aesthetics because of its
recognizable consistency, continues to the reader solace and pleasure while the
post-modern denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste to
share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new
presentation...in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable."(Doherty 46)
Besides this, I think there lies another major difference between the two literary
trends: modernism seeks the spiritual father by the heroic writer who wants to send
his message to the reader living in the fragmented and alienated modern world; by
contrast, postmodernism no longer seeks the spiritual father, showing the extreme
scepticism of beings, and, furthermore, we find there is a persona who recognizes
everything to be in process.
Among other things, modernism attacks and rejects the Victorian convention and
the practical values. And what the modernism writers search for is the 'art for art's
sake', or purity of art. And modernism writers do not show the belief that their
art-works seek a reality. And modernism looks on human beings as isolated and
alienated. The philosophical underpinning of modernism is to view the world as
pessimistic, lacking any unifying logic to the extent that one should perhaps talk
Modernism and Post-Modernism Aesthetics in Seeing Things
211
rather of realities than of reality.
And modernism is a combination of romanticism, realism and symbolism. From
symbolism it took allusiveness in style and an interest in the rarefied mental state.
From realism it borrowed an urban setting. And from romanticism came an
artist-centered view and the retreat into irrationalism. Modernism has also created
intellectual castes that carefully guard their status. The work is an art-for-art's sake
movement founded by self-authenticating psychiatry, verbal cleverness, extreme
individualism, anti-realism and the overemphasis on the irrational.
Meanwhile I think postmodernism was born in the extremely despairing world,
which can be inferred from Adorno's saying, "After Auschwitz, the western arts
cannot produce." Postmodernism takes the subjective idealism of modernism to the
point of solipsism, but rejects the tragic and pessimistic elements of modernism and
concludes that, if one cannot prevent Rome burning, then one might as well enjoy
the fiddling that is left open to one.
With this, post-modern aesthetics is marked by an emphasis on the sensation of
art over its interpretation. and on art as a "sensory" experience over an intellectual
experience, favoring the image over the narrative and the figural over the discursive.
Lyotard describes the figural as the primary processes of the unconscious, similar to
what Freud called the ego. Thus, what Lyotard and other post-modernists want in
art is the "decodification" and subsequent "decolonization" of the libidinal energies.
To do so, the post-modern art switches from modernism's emphasis on signifiers to
an emphasis on the signified and thus one on the preference of image over
narrative. With this collapse and de-differentiation of signifiers into the signified
comes a loss of meaning, depth and interpretation, because no longer is there an
interplay between representations of reality and reality itself.
This de-differentiation increases the impact of the art. Art becomes then a
participatory experience, one in which the audience receives and handles the flow of
libidinal energies which the artist set free. Thus to the post-modernist, it is no
longer about what art means, but about what it does. And thus the sense of control
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language has over art is gone, and the primary process of the unconscious is
freed."(Docherty 36-46)
The reasons I insist that Seeing Things is underpinned by modernism aesthetics
are first because the work reveals a very radical experimentation in language and
form; second because its tendency reflects lyrical romanticism, awakening
self-consciousness through a kind of de-familiarization technique; third because Ezra
Pound's imagist criteria are shown such as economical language, condensation of
expression and musical phrasing; and lastly because the newly experimental
technique and challenging attitude of the writer are based upon the respect of
tradition, not the complete de-construction of tradition.
Meanwhile I think Seeing Things is underpinned by post-modern aesthetics as
well in some respects, -to wit, that it uses intertextuality like in the poem of "
The Journey Back", that the persona thinks of the validity of ordinary experience,
and that the persona attempts to cross the border, de-differentiating between the
abstract and the concrete and also between meaning and art. Moreover, Lyotard's
'aesthetic of sublime' is to be applied to Seeing Things in that we can find some
mixture of the heterogeneous, and moreover in that it praises 'lightness of existence',
flying from moral and responsibility.
Based on these, this paper aims to investigate how modernism and
post-modernism aesthetics are reflected in Seamus Heaney's poetry Seeing Things.
Especially in Chapter III of this paper I will prove this through reading Seeing
Things in detail.
III
Starting with the post-modern factors in Seeing Things, the technique of pastiche
can be firstly pointed in "The Journey Back", whose technique comes from the
literary theory of the post-modernism that new creation is not possible on earth and
Modernism and Post-Modernism Aesthetics in Seeing Things
213
that the present work is the only copy of the past works. The former part of “The
Journey Back” is about the quotation of Dante's lines by Larkin in which he
describes the time of twilight and his own feeling of journey. Through this poem,
the writer, Heaney, wants to express his longing for the late Larkin. This poem
contrasts the past with the present; the comforting routines with weary ordinary
ones; and his dream of being a great hero with the petty actuality of the ordinary
man. Moreover, we can say post-modern aesthetics is contained in this poem in the
respects that the persona emphasizes the value of ordinary things, and especially that
the persona praises lightness of existence:
Larkin's shade surprised me. He quoted Dante:
'Daylight was going and the umber air
Soothing every creature on the earth,
Freeing them from their labours everywhere.
I alone was girding myself to face
The ordeal of my journey and my duty
And not a thing had changed, as rush-hour buses.
Bore the drained and laden through the city.
I might have been a wise king setting out
Under the Christmas lights-except that
It felt more like the forewarned journey back
Into the heartland of the ordinary,
Still my old self. Ready to knock one back.
A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry'.(ST 7)
Moreover, many literary works based upon post-modern aesthetics enjoy writing
about writing itself. Two subtitled poems like "Casting and Gathering" and
"Fostering" belong to this category. In "Casting and Gathering" 'fishing' is used as
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metaphor of writing. Here, writing a poem is identified with two movements,
casting and gathering. And also, the persona says that his poem is written,
combining two contrary characteristics; observing tradition and fleeing to the entire
freedom:
One sound is saying, You are not worth tuppence,
But neither is anybody. Watch it! Be severe.'
The other says, 'Go with it! Give and swerve.
You are everything you feel beside the river.'
I love hushed air. I trust contrariness.
Years and years go past and I do not move
For I see that when one casts, the other gathers
And then vice versa, without changing sides.(ST13)
Especially in "Fostering", the poet describes the progress of creating poems by
transforming heavy greenness into the brilliant one, which identifies our existential
situation with the tone of green color. Here 'greenness' may also mean Irishness:
At school I loved one picture's heavy greennessHorizons rigged with windmills' arms and sails.
..................
Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten. (ST50)
Squarings, the second part of Seeing Things, is a collection of 48 poems,
divided into 4 sections, -that is, "Lightenings", "Settings", "Crossings" and
"Squarings". Here, we can see another example of post-modern aesthetics that the
poet tries to vary the meaning through flowing images. A critic like Michael
Modernism and Post-Modernism Aesthetics in Seeing Things
215
Hofmann comments on these poems as follows: "Concrete experience is transformed
into the abstract, some images are repetitive and the closeness between beings and
non-beings is felt"(London Review 13) And also a critic like Edward Hirsch calls
these poems "dialectics of the spirit"(London Review 7).
In Squarings, "Lightening" is the first section of 12 poems with images
matching the various meanings such as 'lightening', 'illuminating', 'getting out of the
heavy burden' etc. This section shows that the poet searches for the moment when
beauty is revealed, -that is, the moment equivalent to Eliot's 'still-point' or James
Joyce's 'epiphany'. It contains a variety of things such as flowing memories and
images, some tales of Thomas Hardy and priests, revelation of thunder and the poet
wandering for language to awaken senses.
The first poem of "Lightening" is about the relationship between the shifting
brilliances and the wandering spirit; the second about the relevance between building
house and making a poem. and the third about the relationship among writing,
playing and making love. The 6th and 7th poems are about the persona's thought of
Thomas Hardy. The 12th one is about the persona's desire for purifying his soul
through lightening and others.
Moreover, another reason I think, "Lightening" contains the post-modern
aesthetics is that most of the poems describe the writing itself. To take an example,
in the first stanza of the last poem of this part, the persona throws himself a
question of the meaning of 'lightening'. And in its second stanza, the persona,
questioning himself, draws its definition as 'a phenomenal instant when the spirit
flares with pure exhilaration before death'. In the third and the fourth stanzas, the
persona describes the writer's suffering of transforming the untranslatable into the
bliss, associating it with Jesus Christ's sacrifice:
xii
And lightening? One meaning of that
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Beyond the usual sense of alleviation,
Illumination, and so on, is this:
A phenomenal instant when the spirit flares
With pure exhilaration before deathThe good thief in us harkening to the promise!
So paint him on Christ's right hand, on a promotory
Scanning empty space, so body-racked he seems
Untranslatable into the bliss
Ached for at the moon-rim of his forehead,
By nail-craters on the dark side of his brain:
This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.(ST66)
The second section "Setting" also contains 12 poems based on images of
'inserting' and 'sun-setting‘. Most of the poems in "Setting" try to chase some
memories of the quiet sea and the heating slate on the hot summer day, echoes of
railroads, and every sound of cuckoos, grasshoppers and dogs. Moreover it contains
some precious memory between son and father. And besides, the poet raises a
question about where the spirit dwells:
Where does spirit live? Inside or outside
Things remembered, made things, things unmade?
What came first, the seabird's cry or the soul (ST78)
The third part "Crossings" also has many images like 'crossing', 'an intersecting
point', 'a ferry', 'a hybrid' etc. This part shows such movements as the persona's
travelling to the southbound and spiritual world. Besides these, it contains some
other images like race, clapping and sexual intercourse between woman and man on
the St. Brigid Day, the last of which is described as follows:
Modernism and Post-Modernism Aesthetics in Seeing Things
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xxx
On St Brigid's Day the new life could be entered
By going through her girdle of straw rope:
The proper way for men was right leg first,
Then right arm and right shoulder, head, then left
Shoulder, arm and leg. Women drew it down
Over the body and stepped out of it. (ST88)
And the poet recalls his father who is watching his mower with his back to the
setting sun etc.:
xxxii
It steadies me to tell these things. Also
I cannot mention keshes or the ford
Without my father's shade appearing to me
On a path towards sunset, eyeing spades and clothes
That turf cutters stowed perhaps or souls cast off
before they crossed the log that spans the burn.(ST90)
"Squarings" is the fourth part with images like 'anglings', 'aimings', 'feints',
'squints' etc: Here the poet describes a persona who is observing himself and trying
to revise his view of life. From these poems, we can feel the pure, spiritual and
musical atmosphere in an elegiac tone. In this part, we can also witness words
flowing like fluid. The first poem is writer's appraisal about Han Shan's poem:
In famous poems by the sage Han Shan,
Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean
A state of mind. Or different states of mind
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At different times, for the poems seem
One-off, impulsive, the kind of thing that starts
I have sat here facing the cold Mountain (ST97)
Meanwhile it can be said that Seeing Things reflects Modernism aesthetics by
using some symbols and condensed images. The symbol of circle of the The Haw
Lantern which symbolizes acceptance of heterogeneous things is replaced by the line
in the Seeing Things which symbolizes inheritance of tradition. And also, the line as
a symbol awakens the relationship of the past and the present. In many poems such
as "Man and Boy", "The Golden Bough", "Seeing Things", "The Ash Plant", "An
August Night" and "The Pitchfork", the persona longs for his dead father. It also
shows that the writer is loyal to the tradition. In "Markings", such things as balls,
lines and mowers remind the persona of his dead father and gone childhood. For
example, the first part of this poem describes how the poet in his childhood was
playing the ball game :
i
We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts,
That was all. The corners and the squares
Were there like longitude and latitude
Under the bumpy thistly ground, to be
Agreed bout or disagreed about
When the time came. And then we picked the teams
And crossed the line our called names drew between us.(ST8)
The second and the third parts are describing his father's favorable instruments
such as strings and mowers, reminding the persona of his dead father:
iii
All these things entered you
Modernism and Post-Modernism Aesthetics in Seeing Things
219
As if they were both the door and what came through it,
They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.
A mower parted the bronze sea of corn.
A windlass hauled the center out of water.
Two men with a cross-cut kept it swimming
Into a felled beech backwards and forwards
So that they seemed to row the steady earth.(ST9)
Besides, "The Pitchfork" contains the persona's respect for his father by
describing his father as a proficient craftsman, a skillful warrior or a javelin
thrower:
Of all implements, the pitchfork was the one
That came near to an imagined perfection:
When he tightened his raised hand and aimed with it,
It felt like a javelin, accurate and light.
So whether he played the warrior or the athlete
Or worked in earnest in the chaff and sweat,
He loved its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash
Grown satiny from its own natural polish,
........................................
But has learned at last to follow that simple lead
Past its own aim, out to an other side
Where perfection-or nearness to it-is imagined
Not in the aiming but the opening hand.(ST23)
In Seeing Things appear many visual poems like a still-life painting in which is
shown the persona's will to objectify and refine a thing: an object visible is a kind
of medium combining the past with the present, and also its spirituality with its
matter. The poet seems to practice William Carlos Williams's objectivism. "A basket
of Chestnuts", "The Biretta" and "The Settle Bed" are the examples. In "A Basket
of Chestnuts" the basket reminds the poet of his dead friend. Here, a basket of
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chestnuts plays the role of medium to expand its existence from the visible thing
into the invisible area of memory and vision.
In addition, the writer's observation of things gives him the moment of
revelation'."Wheels within wheels" and "The Sounds of Rain" are its examples in
which a persona shows his intention to de-familiarize things. "The Sounds of Rain"
is a poem depicting his longing for the dead critic, Richard Ellmann. In the first
part of this poem, the sound of rain drives the writer into longing for Richard
Ellmann:
An all-night drubbing overflow on boards
On the veranda. I dwelt without thinking
In the long moil of it, and then came to
To dripping eaves and light, saying into myself
Proven, weightless sayings of the dead.
Things like He'll be missed and You'll have to thole.
In the second part, the persona recalls what Ellmann said:
'I had the feeling of an immense debt,'
He said (it is recorded). ' So many years
Just writing lyric poetry and translating.
I felt there was some duty...Time was passing.
And with all its faults, it has more value
Than those early...It is richer, more humane.'
In the third part, the persona feels a foreboding that he will create a
masterpiece, saying that he created a wonderful poem capturing the moment of
revelation:
The eaves a water-fringe and steady lash
Of summer downpour: You are steeped in luck,
I hear them say, Steeped, steeped, steeped in luck.
Modernism and Post-Modernism Aesthetics in Seeing Things
221
And hear the flood too, gathering from under,
Biding and boding like a masterwork
Or a named name that overbrims itself.(ST48-49)
IV
Modernism and post-modernism reflect the spiritual crisis of the modern society.
And these two trends have something in common such as retrospection of the
modern western civilization. Considering the major differences modernism has got
from the postmodernism, modernism can be said to still cling to the western
tradition while post-modernism tries to completely de-construct the western
predominance and thought of dichotomy, rejecting the hierarchical and elite-based
order.
Moreover, modernism pursues the dream of utopia trying to purify practical
values of Victorian period while postmodernism pursues other utopia of full freedom
without any hierarchy and boundary between the unconsciousness and consciousness.
In other words, modernism tries to search for another spiritual father while
postmodernism tries to kill the father.
I think that Seamus Heaney's poetry is characterized by the combination of the
two opposing trends of modernism and post-modernism even if their differences are
somewhat ambiguous. We can say that his poetry has the factor of modernism in
that it continuously reflects the pursuit of tradition symbolized by digging their own
tradition, especially because Seeing Things shows his longing for his dead father.
Moreover, Squarings of Seeing Things seems to imitate T.S.Eliot's "Four Quartets"
where the writer seems to pursue the moment of revelation. And also many poems
of his contain various images just like music.
The reason I can say that Seeing Things is underpinned by post-modern
aesthetics is that especially Squarings of Seeing Things has abstraction without some
boundary between the signifier and the signified. Therefore readers can enjoy the
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entire freedom coming from de-construction of languages without any fixed meaning.
My last conclusion is that Seamus Heaney's comparatively recent poetry, Seeing
Things reflects not only his pursuit for the past tradition but also his desire to
de-construct the traditional values, hoping for creation of new humanism. His poetry
searches for and kills the father at the same time. In other words, it pursues light,
freedom, equality and the song for the people of the whole world just as John
Lennon does in his song "Imagination".
Works Cited
Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London:Routledge, 1995.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity. Indiana University Press, 1977.
Docherty, Thomas (ed). Postmodernism: A Reader. New York:Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1993.
Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1987.
Heaney Seamus. Seeing Things. London: Faber & Faber, 1991.
Kang, Min-gun. "An Ecological Writing for Decolonial Thinking". Yeats Journal of
Korea Vol. 25. Seoul: The Yeats Society of Korea,2006.
Lawrence, Cahoone. From Modernism to Postmodernism. Malden: Blackwell
Publisher, 2003.
Lee, Han-Mook. "W.B. Yeats's Aesthetic Changes in His Poetry". Yeats Journal of
Korea Vol. 25. Seoul: The Yeats Society of Korea,2006.
Niall, Lucy. Postmodern Literary Theory. Malden:Blackwell Publisher, 2000.
Yoon, Ilhwan. "Sacrificial Ritual and a Vision to the Intimate Order: W.B.Yeats and
Georges Bataille". Yeats Journal of Korea Vol. 25. Seoul: The Yeats Society
of Korea, 2006.
Modernism and Post-Modernism Aesthetics in Seeing Things
223
Modernism and Post-Modernism Aesthetics in
Seeing Things
Abstract
Hong, Sung Sook
Modernism and post-modernism are two aspects of aesthetic modernity reflecting
some of the spiritual crises of the western civilization as resistance against the
scientific modernity. These two are similar or the same to each other in seeing the
modern world as fragments and discontinuities with pessimistic tone, the reality as
relativity, and the language as lack.
By contrast, many differences between the two can be seen as well. For
example, modernism reflects Elite's taste of high culture while postmodernism is
impatient with Elite's taste of ideas. And also, modernism hands down humanism
and enlightenment while postmodernism rejects the so-called humanism and
enlightenment. More likely than not, however, the foremost difference will be that
modernism has the spirit of betterment by a kind of stoic attitude through
self-criticism hoping for the birth of the hero who searches for the spiritual father,
while postmodernism reflects a kind of Epicurism emphasizing 'seize the day' by
accepting the commercial, technological and scientific values.
It follows that modernism tries to expand freedom of more people through
digging inner reality while postmodernism tries to expand equality of more people
through de-constructing the concept of hierarchy of the western civilization.
I think that Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things is characterized by the combination
of modernism and post-modernism: his poetry contains the characteristics of
modernism in respect that it continuously reflects the pursuit of tradition. At the
same time, it includes post-modern aesthetics in respect that Squarings of Seeing
Things transforms the concrete into the abstract by de-constructing some of the fixed
meanings, from which readers can enjoy the entire freedom.
My last conclusion is that Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things reflects not only his
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pursuit for the past tradition but also his desire to de-construct it. In brief, his
poetry reflects some ambivalence: the search for the father and killing him, waiting
for Godot and searching for light, freedom, equality and song.
주제어(Key Words)
모더니즘, 포스트 모더니즘 미학(modernism & postmodernism aesthetics), 정신적
父 추구 및 살해(search for the spiritual father, killing the father), 추상과 구상의
간극 허물기(de-differentiating between the abstract and the concrete), 빛, 자유, 평
등 그리고 노래 추구(search for light, freedom, equality and song)
원고접수일: 2008년 3월 31일 수정일: 2008년 4월 25일
게재확정일: 2008년 5월 23일